A: COSTUME, c1825-50
A1: Teton Sioux man, c1850
He wears a ceremonial shirt and leggings of antelope, elk or deer skins. The earliest known shirts were of simple ‘poncho’ style, retaining the original shapes of the animal skins, but sometimes complex forms used more than three hides laced or sewn together. Leggings were simply folded skins with the animals’ legs visible at the feet. The shirt and leggings are decorated with strips of porcupine quillwork, the edges of which have fringes of quill-wrapped horse- or human hair ‘dangles’ – very characteristic of Oglala and Brulé ‘shirt-wearers’ or chiefs’ societies. The neck flap is a truncated triangular shape, also a common trait in ceremonial shirts from the Western Sioux branches. He also wears porcupine-quilled moccasins, and a breechclout of traded stroud cloth. Eagle feather warbonnets were already made in the flaring, back-sloping style when painted by George Catlin in the 1830s. The bonnet brow band and the edges of quillwork strips were sometimes edged with blue ‘pony beads’.
Bows were usually of ash, with notched ends for the string of twisted sinew. They were also recurved, and backed with pericardium and sinew, for extra power. Arrows had triple fletchings tied top and bottom with sinew, and small flint heads; metal points shaped from hoop iron were used later. The ash shafts were incised or painted with wavy ownership lines. Short bows were easy to use on horseback and proved deadly weapons – better than percussion firearms; but they were largely discarded for warfare by the 1870s with the arrival of the breech-loading rifle (only a handful of arrowheads have been found on the Custer battlefield).
Based on a painting by Karl Bodmer c1833, she wears a buffalo robe painted with symbolic designs of ‘box-and-border’ style. The painting on the robe follows the outline of the untrimmed buffalo hide, and the central design or ‘box’ is an abstract reference to the internal organs of the animal. Her dress, showing under the robe, may be the rare side-fold type reported from the eastern margins of the Plains. However, the few surviving examples are thought to be Cree, Santee or Yanktonai, and among the Teton Sioux this construction was unknown after the 1830s. Her moccasins are probably the early soft-soled form.
This shirt is based on a specimen in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh. It is reputed to have belonged to the noted Yanktonai chief Wanata, and to have been presented to fur traders at Fort Tecumseh (later Fort Pierre); it passed through St Louis at one point, but was reported in Scotland as early as 1837. The shirt and leggings are typical early examples, constructed of deer or antelope hides with only nominal tailoring or fitting. The painted warrior and equestrian figures show the beginnings of European influences in their realism; the porcupine quillwork and maidenhair fern techniques and designs are shared with a number of other museum examples variously attributed to upper Missouri River groups. He holds a traded metal pipe-tomahawk; and also wears a buffalo robe, which were usually painted by men with warrior pictographs and battle scenes. He wears the feathers of various birds of prey in his hair.
Black Eye, Upper Yanktonai Sioux, c1872. Holding pipe and tobacco pouch, he wears a necklace of grizzly bear claws. (Photograph, author’s collection)
In the 1760s the British fur trader Jonathan Carver illustrated an Eastern Sioux woman’s upper garment which appears to be joined over the shoulders by straps. The so-called ‘strap dress’, sometimes with separate sleeves, seems to have been one of the earliest reported constructions amongst Woodland tribes and those living on the eastern margins of the Plains, e.g. the Plains Cree, Plains Ojibwa and Assiniboine, amongst whom it survived longer. This girl wears a buckskin strap dress based on a museum specimen, collected by Nathan Sturges Jarvis in the 1830s and now in the Brooklyn Museum. She has buckskin leggings decorated with ‘pony beads’, and porcupine-quilled moccasins.
The Yankton and Yanktonai are known sometimes to have used earth lodges of a type associated with the Mandan, Arikara and Hidatsa tribes on the Missouri River.
B background: Sun Dance lodge
The lodge was constructed of a circle of upright timbers covered with green branches, reflecting the life forces abundant in spring vegetation. There was an opening on the east side of the lodge facing towards the sun at midday. Rising in the centre of the lodge was the Centre, Sun or Sacred Pole, cut from a living cottonwood tree felled in a sacred manner, and sometimes painted red. Wands of chokecherry wood, sage, sweetgrass, buffalo hair, cloth and other sacred fetishes were hung from the Centre Pole. During the rite, lasting four days (or probably longer in the 19th century) the ceremonies re-created the Sioux world and renewed life for all living things. The piercing, cutting and offerings of the dancers’ skin to gain the pity of Wakantanka is thought to be a fairly late development originating amongst the Sioux.
This was a framework of willow saplings covered with robes, blankets or, in recent times, canvas, which symbolically represented the universe. In the centre was built the sacred fire; when this was sprinkled with water the steam rose as ‘the breath of life’. Both men and women – although usually separately – underwent purification by sweating in the intense heat; this preceded participation in religious ceremonies. The Sweat Lodge procedure was one of the seven sacred rites of the Sioux, and it survives today among conservative groups.
Ceremonial pipes were usually flat or round ash stems covered with plaited and wrapped porcupine quillwork and decorated with horsehair, fur and feathers. The stems were split, grooved and reglued for smoking, or the pith was removed with hot wire. Pipe bowls were usually of redstone ‘catlinite’, a steatite fashioned at a quarry in Minnesota by Santee and Yankton craftsmen in T, elbow, or effigy forms, and sometimes inlaid with lead or pewter. Buffalo skulls with sweetgrass and sage stuffed in the eyes and mouth formed the altar, with pipes placed on racks in front. Buffalo skulls or their effigies were also attached to the Centre Pole.
Some Sun Dancers (or ‘pledgers’) were painted and mimicked the movements of dreamed animals: B1 is a black-tailed deer and B2 represents a red deer. Hair ornaments sometimes contained pointed sticks decorated with porcupine quill wrapping and feather pendants. These were used for scratching the body, as dancers were forbidden to touch themselves with their hands. Dancers wore head wreaths, wrist bands and ankle bands made of plaited sage or, in early times, of buffalo fur. It was traditional to let the hair hang loose; and many dancers went barefoot when inside the lodge, wearing moccasins when outside. Around the neck was suspended an eagle bone whistle, sometimes quilled or beaded; and some dancers wore rawhide cut-outs representing the sunflower (which follows the sun during the earth’s orbit). Dancers were bare-chested except for an otter fur cape, but wore a cloth kilt, skirt or clout which reached almost to the ground. Modern Sun Dancers are similarly costumed.
Little Wound, Oglala Sioux, wearing a trailer war-bonnet and beaded shirt with hairlock fringes. Photographed by Heyn during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, Omaha, 1898. (Author’s collection)
Sun Dance pledgers, both male and female, usually made a vow during the previous winter to participate in the rite, in response to a recovery from sickness or release from dreams, out of a desire for revenge or, in recent times, to solicit help with financial or alcohol problems. Abstinence from food and water during the ceremony was obligatory. She wears a trade cloth dress decorated with elk teeth and buffalo hair wrist bands, and holds a sage wreath.
Members of this society had dreamed of bull elks who possessed special powers over the females of their kind; the Elk Dreamers Society therefore had the greatest power for winning women’s hearts. When dancing the men wore triangular masks made of young elk or buffalo skin, with cottonwood branches trimmed to represent antlers and sometimes covered with otter fur. They also carried hoops, sometimes with cross cords supporting a mirror in the centre, and covered with elk skin.
Early Spanish explorers such as Ponce de León, De Soto and Coronado have been reported to have left behind strayed horses; but most historians believe that the introduction of horses to native use began through trade with the colonial Spanish in Sonora c1567 and around Santa Fé by 1600. During the 17th century the descendants of these horses spread north by intertribal trade and in wild herds. These probably included a significant strain of the semi-Arab Andalusian horse, and the emerging Indian pony was a typical product of indiscriminate breeding, the result being a small, tough, big-barrelled horse with a blotched hide. The routes north remain a matter of some debate, but the western Sioux probably obtained their first horses between 1720 and 1750, directly from the south – not from the west, the Rocky Mountain route, as did the northern tribes. Before the arrival of the horse the Indians on the margins of the High Plains used dogs as pack animals and to pull the travois. The arrival of huge horse herds transformed their lifestyle, allowing them considerable mobility to follow the buffalo and to raid rival tribes. The Plains Indian became the perfect hunting and fighting unit with the merging of horse and warrior, whose manoeuvres on horseback allowed the quick release of arrows or the effective use of lance and club. Though horses remain popular among the Sioux today, the distinctive Indian pony had disappeared by 1940.
He carries a combined buckskin bow-and-arrow case and a tobacco bag. His horse has a quilled face mask and its tail is decorated with trade cloth (or sometimes with red cloth and eagle feathers – a sign of war). The warrior’s shield is also displayed. His shirt has quilled strips, based on a known Brulé specimen.
The woman sits on a saddle with pommel and cantle, derived from Spanish models. The horse pulls a travois – two poles lashed in a V-shape to support a wooden or lattice platform – carrying ‘possible bags’, storage containers, parfleche cases and tipi furniture. The artist/explorer George Catlin observed in the 1830s that both horse- and dog-drawn travois were in use during his stay with the Sioux on the Missouri River. The horse has metalwork decorations on its bridle, and beaded saddlebags hang over its flanks. The woman, wearing a quill-decorated robe, holds a porcupine-quilled cradle.
These were painted rawhide envelopes used to store meat or clothing.
The arrival of the horse allowed the transportation of heavier, and hence bigger, buffalo hide tipis. The basis was a three-pole tripod, with some ten additional poles slotted in. In plan the cover was a near half-circle, and when erected on the frame of lodge-poles it formed a tilted cone, staked down round the edge. Some tipis were decorated with painted warrior pictographic scenes, war records or religious symbols. Two ‘ears’ (smoke flaps) were held by two external poles, adjusted for wind direction. Inside a secondary wall or liner was used, although it has recently been suggested that this ‘dew cloth’ only became common in the early reservation period after skin tipis had been replaced by canvas covers. The Sioux lost a great deal of tipi equipment during the Indian Wars, as the US Army forced continual camp moves in their determined campaign to break Sioux resistance.
He wears an immature eagle feather warbonnet, which were used without the military obligations of the ‘old days’ when appearing in ‘Wild West shows’ or at Fourth of July celebrations. Over a white man’s shirt he wears a ‘hairpipe’ breastplate of bone tubes obtained from traders, and otter skin set with mirrors. Indians had adopted gauntlets, arm bands, cuffs, collars and ties from the US military, but covered them with beadwork. His blue cloth blanket is edged with yellow ribbon (or selvedge-edged), and a blanket strip of beadwork is sewn across it. Beaded leggings and moccasins complete his outfit. He holds an eagle wing fan, a beaded tobacco pouch/pipe bag, and his ceremonial pipe.
Skin warrior and society shirts continued to be made and worn during the second half of the 19th century, although they tended to have partly tailored sleeves and bodies. Buckskin or cloth leggings with outstanding flaps had replaced skin-tight tube leggings. Beaded strips replaced quillwork but painted ornamentation representing individual feats continued to be used. This Yanktonai man has a stroud cloth trade blanket with a wide beaded strip slung over his shoulder, and holds a buckskin gun case with beaded decoration. Note his huge necklace of bear claws, and the dentalium shell hair ornaments characteristic of Yankton and Yanktonai men. The Sioux regarded the bear as a source of great power.
Western Sioux shirt, c1860 (rear). This shirt was worn by various tribal diplomats in Washington: Red Cloud, American Horse, Touch-the-Clouds (see page 20) and Little Big Man were all photographed wearing it. It is now in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. A fine hide shirt with beaded strips and heavy decoration of hairlock fringes, it is painted blue (upper part) and yellow (lower part). The beaded neck flap – basically of red, white, black, dark blue and light blue beadwork with light green and yellow details – is a V-shape divided into two at the bottom, possibly to indicate the wearer’s status and office (see Taylor, 1988). The beaded strips at shoulder and arm are basically white edged with dark green, with light blue and dark blue, and blocked lines of red, yellow and light blue. The small quartered blocks on the blue torso are light blue/yellow and red/white. (Author’s photograph, 1997)
The native dress of Santee men reflected their geographical proximity to the Missouri valley, Woodland and Prairie tribes. Moccasins were front-seam or vamped types, and leggings of buckskin; where trade cloth had replaced hide for the latter, they retained the ‘front’ seams. Our model carries a gunstock-shaped war club, and a large quilled pipe stem with cut-out slats. He has a quilled knife case slung at his throat, a Sioux style reported as early as the mid-18th century. His cloth aprons are decorated with cut-and-fold ribbonwork, a craft virtually unknown among the Western Sioux. He wears Hudson’s Bay Company sashes for a belt and a turban; these were copied from earlier Indian-made fibre and wool sashes.
He wears a porcupine hair headroach, and his hair is wrapped with otter fur. His vest is quilled in floral designs, adopted by Sioux mixed-bloods from c1875 from trading contacts along the Missouri River. His breechclout and leggings are also of trade cloth. He holds a ‘horse memorial’ dance stick in honour of a horse killed in battle.
By the 1870s the ‘three-skin’ buckskin woman’s ceremonial dress was often fully beaded over the cape. These ‘yokes’ (sometimes separate pieces) sometimes bore symbolic female designs – e.g. the U-shaped abstract motif here which refers to the turtle, a female protective symbol. The beadwork was by now being refined into increasingly complex geometrical designs using the imported Italian ‘seed beads’, which gave the women a huge range of colours in which to practice their art. The Sioux were also capable metalworkers, and our figure shows a belt with ‘German silver’ conches. Note her dentalium shell earrings and elk tooth necklace. She holds a bone or elk antler hide-scraper with a flint or iron blade, used to scrape the fatty tissue from the inner, or the hair from the outer side of buffalo and deer hides.
The native dress of the Santee groups resembled that of their neighbours the Winnebago, Sac and – to a lesser extent – Ojibwa. They were in contact with white traders from the 18th century and with Canadian Métis from the early 19th century. Women wore cloth blouses and wrap-around skirts, decorated for ceremonial occasions with either beadwork or ribbonwork. The Santee also absorbed a considerable amount of Cree, Plains Ojibwa and Métis material culture, particularly following the Minnesota war of 1862-63 when many Santee took up residence in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
She wears a trade cloth dress, with projecting tabs at the lower sides which echo the animal legs of earlier skin dresses. The whole upper part is covered with dentalium shells. She also wears a ‘tack’ belt (leather decorated with brass tacks), from which hang a beaded knife case and a ‘strike-a-light’ pouch. Vertically strung bone ‘hairpipes’ reaching down as far as the knee were popular amongst the Yanktonai and also with Teton women. She holds a buffalo calf skin workbag and a painted rawhide container.
E4: Teton Sioux girl, 1890
Based on a photogaph of Kate Blue Thunder (Kate Roubideaux), she wears a buckskin dress, leggings and moccasins completely covered with sinew-sewn ‘lazy stitch’ beadwork in geometric patterns, including US flag motifs; the complex filigree designs were a late 19th century development. Sioux moccasins had hard rawide soles, and forked tongues were common on Teton examples. Note that she carries a doll with a carefully worked costume.
The Santee Sioux retained their semi-permanent Woodland-style villages comprising bark lodges with pitched roofs and platforms for storing maize. They also used tipis as auxiliary or summer dwellings, however - particularly the Sisseton and Wahpeton branches.
Amongst the Missouri River tribes such as the Omaha, Ponca and Pawnee, warrior societies wore distinctive attire usually consisting of a porcupine and deer hair roach (headdress), a bustle or ‘Crow Belt’, and a circle and trailer of the feathers of birds of prey – whose scavenging of the field after battle provided the symbolic connection with warfare. From the top of the bustle two feathers projected, representing slain warriors – one a friend, the other an enemy. The belt which secured the bustle behind the waist also held braids of plaited sweetgrass – hence the popular name of the characteristic dancing style, the ‘Grass Dance’. During the 1860s these ceremonies were adopted from the Omaha tribe by the Western Sioux, who named it the Omaha Dance or Society. In the late 19th century its function became largely social and it was popular during Fourth of July celebrations. It has formed the basis for the continuing male powwow dancing up to modern times. In early reservation days dancers sometimes used long whistles, the open end carved to represent a bird’s head. The Crow Owners Society members wore similar bustles of feathers from birds of prey.
An important military society of the Teton Sioux, this is said to have originated long ago with a man who dreamed of an owl, in consequence of which its members used only owl feathers to fletch their arrows. At meetings each member carried a rattle made of the dew claws of deer fastened to a beaded stick, as used in many Sioux dances. Warrior society sashes were sometimes pinned to the ground in battle so that there would be no retreat. Quirts notched and carved in a zig-zag pattern to represent lightning bolts were used by officers of several military societies.
The Strong (or Brave) Heart Society was probably founded by Sitting Bull (our model here), Gall and Crow King. They wore headdresses consisting of buckskin skullcaps covered with fringes of ermine skin, split curved buffalo horns and owl feathers. Some members carried ring-shaped rawhide rattles, and lances decorated with a row of eagle feathers attached to a strip of red trade cloth extending the whole length of the shaft. In their dances they adopted a bobbing, up-and-down movement. Strong Heart Society shields were usually painted with an eagle design and trimmed with eagle feathers.
This society was so named because its members were supposed to be wily and active on the warpath. They wore kit-fox skin around the neck and wrist. When dancing they painted their bodies yellow, and held a bow-lance. In battle the bow-lance was driven into the ground and warriors fought under its perceived powers of protection.
The religious movement popularly known as the Ghost Dance originated in California; it was revived in Nevada, where Sioux emissaries learned the rite from the Paiute tribe, and it gained many adherents amongst the Teton in the Dakotas. As it began to take on a more belligerent stance in the face of mounting white opposition, specially painted clothes were claimed to give protection against the white man’s bullets. The Sioux usually painted their foreheads, cheeks and chins with red ochre. This man’s muslin shirt is painted with religious motifs and trimmed with hair fringes; he wears blue stroud cloth leggings with beaded strips, and fully-beaded moccasins. He holds a rawhide drum and its beater.
Sioux Ghost Dance clothes were usually made from muslin, although a few dresses were made from cotton, or even from flour sacks. The religious symbols painted on dresses and shirts had become intermixed with the white man’s signs, but eagles, butterflies, dragonflies, four-pointed stars and moons linked the dancers to the natural world. Visions experienced during the ceremony would help the reunion of the dancers with their dead friends and relatives.
With Euro-American garments he wears a beaded vest, with pictographic figures of warriors holding US flags, and fully-beaded trousers, with quilled moccasins. After he is taken away from his family to attend public school he will only be allowed to wear white man’s clothes.
A number of Cheyenne families settled with the Sioux at Pine Ridge Reservation; and this lattice-type cradle is more usually associated with the Cheyenne. It is fixed to a wooden frame, with characteristic painted boards decorated with brass tacks; the whole cradle is solidly beaded. On the hood hangs a beaded umbilical cord holder in the shape of a turtle.
This couple demonstrate the extent to which Sioux women had developed geometrical beadwork patterns. The man has a solidly-beaded vest and trousers, the former based on a specimen which belonged to Andrew Knife, an Oglala from Pine Ridge Reservation, which is now in the Blackmore Collection at the Hastings Museum in England. The woman wears a fully-beaded yoke on her dress, and beaded leggings. Her horse has a beaded saddle blanket and headstall. (Fully-beaded examples of even such items as doctors’ bags and violin cases are known.)
During the 1970s a new style of men’s dance dress developed amongst the Western Sioux, who by this time preferred their own name for themselves in the Western dialect – ‘Lakota’. It has become known as ‘contemporary traditional’ dress, because it uses elements of early dance dress – e.g. porcupine and deer hair headdress, beaded arm bands and cuffs, ‘hairpipe’ breastplates, eagle feather bustle, angora anklets, and solidly-beaded cape and moccasins. This figure is based upon a dancer seen by the artist at Eagle Butte, Cheyenne River Reservation, in 1988. He is believed to have been a veteran of the Vietnam War.
A Vietnam veteran whose status fitted him to carry the US flag during the Grand Entry at a modern ‘Lakota’ Powwow. He wears combat fatigues (camouflage BDUs); and a beret with a red-dyed eagle feather, indicating that he was wounded in battle.
This dancer wears a wolfskin on his head decorated with red-tailed hawk feathers and quilled hoops. He has a fully-beaded vest, arm and knee bands, cuffs, brass sleigh bells, angora anklets and beaded moccasins. This style of dance dress has become very popular amongst men of many tribes from Canada to Oklahoma, and represents a distinctively ‘Lakota’ contribution to Pan-Indianism.
Western Sioux ceremonial shirts of ‘poncho’ type.
(1) Basic construction from two skins
(2) Arrangement of skins to form the shirt – 2 x A, 2 x B
(3) Early shape with small shoulder strips
(4) Early shape with quilled strips, disc and hair fringe
(5) Mid-/late 19th C, back view – part tailored, with beaded strips and buckskin fringe
Early skin leggings: (1) Basic skin and cut (2) With added gusset (3) Folded legging